


take me out, take me home

by sabisun, unicornpoe



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst with a Happy Ending, Battle Couple, Blood and Violence, Established Relationship, F/M, Loneliness, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mutual Pining, Reunions, Separations, Survival
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:21:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28073145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabisun/pseuds/sabisun, https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicornpoe/pseuds/unicornpoe
Summary: A moan behind Eddie. He turns around and climbs the last few steps, throwing himself into the tangle of bodies in the house.There are more of them up here. Eddie swings, and swings, and swings.He isn’t watching when it happens.He isn’t watching when it happens, so he doesn’t see Richie get hit, he doesn’t see him fall. He doesn’t know it’s happening until Ben gasps out his name, until he hears the thud, and Richie’s strangled yell.Eddie whirls around. The stairwell is empty.*Or, a zombie apocalypse AU.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Comments: 12
Kudos: 64





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello! eden and i went completely crazy with this idea and... this happened, hehe. we hope you like it!

_ His knife splits the wood.  _

_ He concentrates, lining the edge of the blade up with the way the bark runs, hand as steady as he can make it. It’ll be legible if Richie doesn’t fuck this up.  _

_ “There you are, dipshit.” _

_ Richie lowers knife and turns around, already grinning. “Morning Eddie darling,” he says, and his heart leaps at the scowl Eddie gives him. Lovely and creased and never as annoyed as he wants Richie to think. “Hope I didn’t ruin your precious beauty sleep.”  _

_ Eddie scoffs, and crosses his arms like he does when he’s about to lecture somebody. Well, Richie. Almost always Richie.  _

_ The sleeves of Richie’s jacket are too long on him. Only his fingertips are exposed.  _

_ “Fuck off,” Eddie says. “You weren’t there when I woke up so I thought you’d gotten yourself eaten by a zombie or something.” _

_ Richie sets a hand over his chest, right at the place where he can feel his heart thumping beneath his skin, beneath the fabric of his t-shirt. “Aw, Eds. Were you worried about little old me? Little old Richie?”  _

_ Eddie rolls his eyes broadly, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Fuck you,” he says, “Of course I was. Idiot.”  _

_ Richie’s struck again by how blunt Eddie can be, doling out his words like punches or like prayers. It’s one of the many things Richie loves about him.  _

_ He loves this, too: the way Eddie’s hand slices through the air when he’s trying to prove a point like he is right now, the way the sleeve of the jacket pools down around his elbow with the movement. He’s aggressive and he’s wonderful and he’s Richie’s.  _

_ “You can’t leave like that, Rich,” Eddie says now. There’s still a snap to his voice but there’s something else, too: something wavers beneath the surface. Unsteady. Richie takes a step toward him. “You have to tell me where you’re going. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s  _ dangerous _ , Richie. What if I don’t find you next time? What if something happens and I can’t… What if I can’t save you? What if—”  _

_ Richie reaches for his hand, stopping his rant.  _

_ “Hey, hey, hey,” he murmurs, folding Eddie’s fingers in his. “I’m sorry, Eds. It’s okay, I’m okay.” _

_ He repeats it again, an invocation, rubbing small circles on the skin of Eddie’s wrist. Eddie breathes in and out. Lets his eyes drift closed.  _

_ “Yeah, there you go.” Richie cups Eddie’s face, thumbs caressing the dark circles under Eddie’s eyes. “Look at me?”  _

_ He opens them. Big, brown, glassy with a moisture they don’t have to talk about. Richie melts, weak at the knees.  _

_ “I’m here, Eds,” he murmurs, and it’s true, true. “A couple of dead guys won’t be able to take me away from you. Look—you hitched yourself to me yesterday. There’s no looking back now. You marry me once, you’re stuck with me forever, baby.”  _

_ Richie can see the corners of Eddie’s mouth lift as he tries not to smile. Richie wants to kiss him.  _

_ “But I’m sorry for freaking you out. I wasn’t thinking. Forgive me, Eddie my love?”  _

_ Eddie lets that smile out, as small as it is. He lifts himself up on his toes and brushes his mouth over Richie’s in a kiss, their hands still twined together.  _

_ “I do,” Eddie says quietly. He gives Richie one more kiss before looking at the tree behind him.  _

_ He lets go of Richie as he takes a closer look. “What were you doing out here anyway?”  _

_ “Oh, I was just consummating our marriage another way with this handy dandy and very badass knife you gave me,” Richie says delightedly, and twirls the blade over his palm. He calls it his wedding knife. A wedding knife to fill in the place of a wedding ring. The coolest and also most romantic thing he’s ever seen. “Proof of our love, and all that.”  _

_ Eddie laughs. His face creases in another way when he does that. Richie could just eat him up. “Well, I’m glad you’re putting it to good use,” Eddie says. _

_ “But this is it,” Richie says, holding it close. “I’m not using it for anything else, I can’t dirty up this bad boy. It’s too precious. My prized possession.”  _

_ Not that he has many other possessions in this barren world. Just a knife. Eddie and a wedding knife.  _

_ It’s more than enough for him.  _

_ Eddie doesn’t bother to argue. Eddie hums and smiles again, watching Richie with a fondness that Richie will never get used to. It makes him want to cry, if he’s being honest. _

_ When Eddie asks what Richie was planning to carve, he answers, and Eddie looks like Richie just offered him the entire world. He would if he could. He fucking would. _

_ Eddie wipes away something from his face which might be tears, and Richie’s chest aches with how much he loves him.  _

_ “Come here,” Eddie says, softly. “I want to do it with you.”  _

_ Walking over, Eddie takes his hand. The one with the wedding knife, fingers tender with care, guiding it over to the marking Richie started before.  _

_ And they carve R+E into the tree together.  _

*

_ Seven years later— _

Eddie moves through the basement of the house on animal-quiet feet. 

It’s dark down here, the air thick with the smell of damp and decay. Unusual scents in times like these. The world is so dry now that Eddie has gotten used to dust caked into the lines of his palms, sweat dried slick at the nape of his neck. This part of the world, at least. The only part they see anymore. 

The shadows move to the right. He turns fast without thinking about it, hands up.

“Hey, hey, slow your roll, babe,” Richie whispers. He’s all made up of lines down here, tall and wide and gray in the darkness, but his smile flashes with the bit of light spilling in through the open doorway at the top of the stairs. “Just me.”

“Asshole,” Eddie whispers back. His heart thuds solidly behind his breastbone. The light glints again, this time off of the blade he’s clutching in his hand. He didn’t realize he’d drawn it. The weight of it sits like an extension of himself in his palm. Something known. “Do you want me to have a heart attack?”

They haven’t moved beyond the base of the stairs yet. This is a big house, one with three floors and the square footage of a place somebody like Eddie never would’ve entered growing up. Perfect for Eddie and Richie and the rest of their gang to pass a couple nights in, rest up together before the next leg of their journey. 

Eddie feels dead on his feet. They’ve been walking for four days without more than a couple hours rest in between, trying to cover as much ground as possible. Trying to find someplace safe. He knows the rest of them feel just as exhausted as he is, even though none of them ever complain: they’ve been moving slower and slower, their reaction times a bit more sluggish than they should be. And Eddie knows Richie thinks he missed the way he twisted his ankle on a cracked slab of concrete yesterday, catching himself before he hit the ground, but Eddie didn’t. 

They need a rest. All of them. 

“Only a heart attack of love,” Richie says now, and moves in a little closer, voice low enough that it’s just a breath in Eddie’s ear. He’s standing right by the hand that clutches the knife but he smiles still, wide on the edges, like he’s never been afraid in his life. Eddie could stab him now for how close they’re standing. Eddie could push up onto his toes and kiss him, and he would if they weren’t in the middle of a job. “Oh my god I love my husband so much! I’ll simply perish,” Richie says in a bad approximation of Eddie’s voice, clutching at his chest. 

He’s an idiot. Eddie loves him. 

“Shut up,” Eddie hisses, “Richie, what the hell.” But he’s smiling. He doesn’t bother trying to hide it. 

Richie’s hair is messy, grown too long over his ears and down the back of his neck. He needs a shave; Eddie will sit him down upstairs when they’re sure it’s safe, he will pull out the razor blade they keep wrapped carefully away in their pack for things like this and help him glide over the curve of his jaw without nicking skin. Without drawing blood. He will hold Richie’s face in his hands. Gentle palms against coarse skin. 

He’s lovely when he laughs, carefully soundless. 

“You know you love me,” Richie murmurs. 

Eddie fucking does. So much. 

He scowls broadly, jerks his head to the other side of the room. “Go check that corner, Rich.”

“Aye aye, captain,” Richie murmurs with a wink. He squeezes Eddie’s waist with one big hand as he slips by, the other reaching for the knife on his belt. 

There isn’t much left down here, either taken by the residents when they left or—more likely—picked over by scavengers and those unturned who remain, just trying to survive. A few cans of paint along the edge of a water-stained wall. A bike tire. Something that looks like a bundle of damp tarps in the corner, shredded by weather or claws— 

Movement. A few feet to Eddie’s left.

He doesn’t speak, doesn’t bother to call out. The lump of tarps rises to a height, assembles itself into a shape of loose gray skin and shambling bone, arms stretched out and mouth gaping blood-red and wide. It isn't tarps at all. It makes the sound they all make, a wailing, hungry kind of moan, and Eddie runs it through the chest. 

His blade slides through like a knife through the mushiest part of a rotten peach, like a sword through paper, and the smell of it rolls toward him in a gagging cloud. Putrid and low-hanging and long dead. 

Eddie jerks his knife free. The things collapses in front of him, folding inward like a game of pickup sticks. 

He wipes the gore from his hands and his blade onto the hem of his t-shirt. It needs to be thrown away anyway. 

“That never gets any less terrifying to watch,” Richie says.

Eddie turns. Richie stands a few feet away, eyes wide as he looks at Eddie, his free hand in a fist at his side. It used to make him sick, Eddie knows, back in the beginning. The sight of something humanoid—as devoid of personhood as these creatures are—being run through. Spilling out their rancid insides. 

He’s more used to it now, and so is Eddie. That doesn’t mean it’s any more enjoyable. 

“Is it weird to say you’re kinda sexy when you’re killing zombies?” Richie asks. 

“Yes,” Eddie says immediately. He feels as shaken as Richie looks. That one had come out of nowhere. “Uh huh, yep, it is.”

Richie shrugs. The corner of his mouth lifts. “Call me weird then,” he says, and waggles his eyebrows. 

Eddie huffs out a laugh despite himself. He just killed something, and it isn’t the first time, it isn’t the hundredth time, and his chest is tight, and still Richie makes him laugh. “Weirdo,” he grins, and “Be careful.”

Richie blows him a kiss. They keep going. 

Eddie can hear footsteps on the floor above them: Ben and Bev, he thinks, with Bill and Mike scouting out the top floor. It's a routine the six of them have worked out over the past year that they've been traveling together. A system. 

Have each other's backs, and get out alive. 

"Clear," Mike calls from above them, his voice ringing down through the rafters. It carries easily. Eight years after the end of the world, and this house hasn't held up well. 

Eddie takes one last look at Richie, who's slipping into the half-bath down here to check it, before he moves on to the next room. 

Mostly the same as the first, if a bit smaller—and thankfully free of zombies. Eddie clears it quickly, thankful for the little window at the top of the wall that sheds a brackish gray light down onto the room for him to see by. Nothing in here but stained carpet, peeled back like fingernails, and chunks of drywall that have fallen down from the ceiling and walls, leaving beams and dusty insulation exposed. There's a splotch of something wine-red and viscous in the corner: Eddie doesn't know what it is, and Eddie doesn't want to. 

Eddie makes short work of the next two rooms—clear, and clear, and he feels some of the tension he always seems to carry in the line of his shoulders now begin to slip away—and moves back through them, just wanting to reach Richie. They haven't had a chance to really relax in about a week; Eddie just wants to... just wants to sit down with him, get his arms around Richie's waist and bury his face in Richie's chest and just  _ breathe _ . Breathe him in. 

"C'mon, sweetheart," Eddie says, but his words are drowned out by a scream. 

God, it sounds like Bev. The noise is sharp and short, like it's been cut quiet,  _ forced _ quiet, spilling halfway down the stairs that lead into the main part of the house, and Eddie starts running for the stairs before her voice finishes echoing. They can’t lose Bev. They can’t lose  _ any  _ of them. 

He passes Richie as he runs, sees his weapon still drawn, pushes past him to the base of the steps and takes them two at a time. There is some sort of instinct in Eddie, ancient and all-consuming and inexplicable, that will always throw him into danger before Richie, and he lets it take over now, he lets it take over as he throws open the door at the top of the basement stairs right as the body of a zombie comes hurtling toward it, one of Bev’s bullets sunk deep between its hollow eyes. 

“There’s more,” Bev says sharply, and then, suddenly, there isn’t time to say anything else. 

There are so many of them. They force their way toward the steps, moving in a swell of putrid gray flesh, smelling sharply of iron and meat left out too long. Eddie, his back to the steps, his back to Richie, slashes with his knife, catching one in the throat, another the sternum. There is a spindly hand on his forearm, fingers digging into his flesh like worms, and he pulls his blade free and sinks it into the undead’s wrist, slicing off its hand. 

Ben skids into the room behind Bev, Bill and Mike at his heels, and Eddie lets himself focus on what’s in front of him. 

There is a certain point where he has to stop thinking about what he’s doing or he won’t be able to keep doing it. No matter what it means for his own survival. 

He doesn’t know how many of them he’s ended when he feels Richie at his elbow, pressed up beside him in the narrow stairwell space—there are bodies littering the floor at their feet but there are more zombies spilling into the hallway for every one they kill. 

Eddie meets his eyes above the flash of a knife blade, the swing of an elbow. Something passes between them, unnameable and known. 

There’s something like relief in having him there. There’s something like terror, too. 

“I really fucking hate you guys,” Richie says, and drives his knife upwards into the gut of a zombie that had been lurching its way toward Eddie. “I’m trying to—shit—I’m trying to spend a nice evening with my husband and my friends and you’re ruining it.”

“Newsflash, Richie, they don’t fucking care,” Bev says. Eddie can’t see her or Bill over the tangle of undead, but he can hear both of them grunting as they swing, can hear the meaty thud of Bev’s bullets sinking into their targets even though there’s a silencer on her gun, so he isn’t too worried. “Bastards.”

“Please shut u-up,” Bill says now. “Oh my  _ god. _ ”

Eddie slices the jugular of the next zombie that comes toward him and his blade gets caught; he has to place his hand on the dead creature’s shoulder, has to feel the wet, mealy coldness of its skin as he uses his grip for leverage and jerks his knife free. It leaves a residue on his palm, filmy and horrible. In another lifetime, Eddie wouldn’t have been able to handle this. In another lifetime, Eddie would be puffing at an inhaler he hasn’t used in years, dousing himself in hand sanitizer. God, hand sanitizer. He’d fucking kill for a bottle of the stuff. 

Kill. Ha. He’s gotta remember to tell Richie that one. 

“You’re such a wet blanket, Billy Boy,” Richie says. He’s panting a little, but Eddie watches him take out a zombie between one breath and the next. “Eds laughed.”

Eddie kinda did laugh. “I didn’t laugh,” Eddie says. 

Another body comes shuffling toward the steps, bent nearly in half but still alive. There’s a bullet hole in its lower back—new, by the looks of things, leaking gummy blood—but the thing is still alive if the way it reaches toward Richie with bruised up hands means anything. It swipes at his face, fingers nearly grazing the bridge of his nose: a flare goes off in Eddie’s chest at that and he stabs the zombie in the chest, in the throat, once, twice for good measure. It hits the ground, and the house groans. 

For one suspended moment there is nobody living but Eddie and Richie in the stairwell. “I think you got it, Eds,” Richie says quietly. 

Eddie looks at him. “I love you,” he says. He’s not sure why he says it now, but it’s true. Always has been for seven years, and will be for several more.

Richie’s eyes go wide behind his glasses. He still reacts like that sometimes when Eddie tells him, even though he must’ve said it a thousand times by now. Especially when Eddie says it at random times like this. But they both know they love each other. Saying I love you is like taking out an old poem they cherish, a reminder that they’re here and they’re in love. It's deep, warm. It’s a homey feeling that lives at the core of their hearts, and Richie smiles slightly now, blood on his face, on his hands, and Richie says, “Love you too, Spaghetti.”

A moan behind Eddie. He turns around and climbs the last few steps, throwing himself into the tangle of bodies in the house.

There are more of them up here. Eddie swings, and swings, and swings. 

He isn’t watching when it happens. 

He isn’t watching when it happens, so he doesn’t see Richie get hit, he doesn’t see him fall. He doesn’t know it’s happening until Ben gasps out his name, until he hears the thud, and Richie’s strangled yell. 

Eddie whirls around. The stairwell is empty. 

One of the zombies has a hand caught in the strap of his fanny pack but he yanks himself away anyway, not caring when it’s ripped away from his waist. “Richie!” he yells. God, god, he can taste his heart in his throat. He’s shaking so hard that it feels like the floor is tilting beneath him—feels like the house is rumbling, tipping, lurching off-center with a creak— 

“Eddie,  _ Eddie—“  _ There’s a hand in the back of his t-shirt, hauling him backward. The doorframe around the stairwell buckles on one side; the house shrieks, wood and plaster and brick sliding away. 

“Let  _ go, _ ” Eddie says and pulls, running toward the stairs on unsteady legs. Half of the ceiling falls in toward them, catching a new wave of zombies beneath it; Eddie ducks, tastes plaster dust at the back of his tongue. Richie isn’t in the stairwell. Richie  _ isn’t in the stairwell  _ and Eddie is going to  _ scream.  _

He doesn’t realize he’s already screaming until he goes to take a breath and his voice breaks, shattering in half as another section of ceiling tile comes hurtling down toward his head.  _ Richie,  _ he is saying, and his friends are too. All five of them.  _ Richie, Richie,  _ “Richie, Richie,  _ Richie _ —“

“We need to get out.” Mike is there suddenly, and the stairwell door frame is completely gone, is nothing but a ripped-torn hole in the wall, a pile of wooden beams, and the floor lurches down toward it. “Eddie,  _ now. _ ”

“ _ No, _ ” Eddie says viciously. There is wood beneath his hands, he is pulling beams away from the stairwell,  _ Richie is in the stairwell,  _ Richie was  _ there  _ and now he’s  _ not,  _ Richie, Richie, Richie. “Let go of me, Mike, let me go, fucking—don’t touch me, he’s down there—“

“Eddie, please,” Bev says. Her hands on him now, and Mikes, and Ben’s, and Bill’s, dragging him away. Dragging him away from  _ Richie.  _ “Eddie, we are going to die in here if we don’t get out—”

“I don’t  _ care.”  _ Eddie gets out of their grip somehow. His strength isn’t his own. There’s blood beneath his nails, there’s plaster raining down on his head. The house is louder than his screams. “I have to find him, I have to get him, I have to—I can still  _ save him— _ ”

“Eddie, honey, I’m sorry,” Bev says, and she’s crying, they all are, and “I’m sorry,” she says again. “I’m sorry,” and she lifts her gun and the butt of it meets his temple and he doesn’t know anything else. 

  
  


*

Richie opens his eyes, and the screaming starts. 

There is something in his mouth, something wet dripped down over his forehead and onto his cheeks. His back is very, very warm—his back, Richie thinks, his back is on fire—but that feeling tapers off at his tailbone, turns freezing at his hips, and then… and then nothing. And then nothing. 

Nothing. Nothing. Screaming— 

Richie breathes in sharp, lungs constricted like he’s between the pages of a book, like he’s in one of those machines they used to crush cars with in junkyards.  _ A rock and a hard place,  _ Richie thinks, words running through his head like sand through a sieve. He can’t hold onto anything. The screaming is too loud.  _ A rock and a hard place. A rock. A rock.  _

Rock. Pinning him facedown. 

He’s a bug in a glass case, squirming his futile squirm, his weak limbs scrabbling against his own volition over the hard place he finds himself on. Richie’s hands meet dust, meet splintered wood, meet something slick and wet and hot that feels like blood. Richie’s hands meet a jagged chunk of something embedded firmly enough in the floor that it doesn’t move when he tugs at it. The house screams around him, and Richie pulls. 

The nothingness goes away. 

Whatever had been pinning him down—not a rock, couldn’t have been; this is a house, this is a dark screaming house, there’s blood under his hands—shifts off of him and leaves a trail of agony as his own blood rushes back down his hips and into his legs. He yanks himself free, rubble groaning around him, and lets out a dry sort of sob at the feeling rushing back into his limbs. A fire poker through meat. 

Richie is still for a minute, shaking. He lets his eyes close again.

Those screams, those terrible shrieks. They resolve themselves into what they really are: the sound of a house splitting itself in half, peeling apart at the joints, ripped away from the inside out. It rumbles around him. Through him. 

His throat is very dry, and his legs hurt, and all of him is cold now, cold and wet, shoved in a pitch-dark space that stays that way whether or not his eyes are open. 

Richie opens his mouth to speak. Inhales dusts and viscera. Chokes, coughs, tries again. 

“Eddie,” Richie says, thin as a whisper. His heart is beating so fast in his chest that it feels like a flock of birds, it feels like a fever. Richie sits up, in the dampness, in the dark. “ _ Eddie. _ ”

There is no answer. The house wails. 

That space Richie is in is so tiny that he barely has any room to move, and so dark that he can’t see where he’s going when he does. His glasses are still on his face though. “Eddie,” Richie says again, even though he’s not down here, he got out, he must have, and thinks,  _ small goddamn wonders.  _

It’s water he’s coiled in. An inch or two of it, cold and flowing, acrid smelling and slimy. 

He can’t see, he can’t—he can’t fucking  _ breathe.  _ He follows it. 

Richie remembers. Richie remembers… remembers fighting on the staircase, Eddie at his side, Bev and Ben and Mike and Bill ahead of them, and so many zombies the air had been thick with it. Remembers moving a little too slow, sluggish with exhaustion, the pain in his ankle, and yet jittery at the same time—the way he always gets when Eddie and the rest are in any kind of danger. Every cell of him singing. Remembers misjudging a swing of his knife, remembers the creature he was fighting falling down toward him, a dead weight, and knocking him down the stairs. 

Remembers connecting with the floor, and a bright spot behind closed eyelids. Remembers nothing else. 

His arms shake, bearing his weight as he crawls. Adrenaline. Exhaustion. His palm slips beneath him and he falls, catching himself on his wrists. The house cries. The sound of running water grows stronger. 

They must have gotten out. Eddie and the others. They must have. 

He needs them to have gotten out.

His mouth is full of blood. 

“Eddie,” murmurs Richie, nonsense, a chant, and the word breaks on his tongue. “Eddie.”

Ahead of him, a light. Not an opening, not—not sunshine. A reflection, though. If he can get through this space, if he can duck around this board and slip beneath that beam— 

The sound of rushing water roars in Richie’s ears as the house shakes around him, and a hole in the floor of the bathroom he’d cleared earlier gapes up at him with jagged teeth. 

It’s the only way out. 

Richie doesn’t think. 

He stands, legs nearly buckling, and down he goes. 

He goes down, the light dimmer the further he travels. He goes down, another step, two, feet immediately drenched.  _ Fucking fantastic. _ He goes down, limping into the sewers, wincing with each step. 

He doesn’t know where this way will lead, only knows that it must lead somewhere. His ankle is throbbing, and his cuts and bruises are stinging all over his body, but the pain is an afterthought in the back of his mind. 

Instead there’s panic building up in his chest—he doesn’t know if the Losers are okay, if they made it out. If they’re even fucking alive. 

They are the most important thing right now. Finding them. Finding his husband, his Eddie, his—Eddie. Finding Eddie. 

Far above Richie, the earth shakes as the last of the house collapses into the ground. He doesn’t give it a second thought.

He needs to see them. Make sure they aren’t hurt. He needs to know that Eddie is breathing and alive and safe, a heartbeat living beneath his skin. He doesn’t need anything else. 

Dirty sewage water splashes against his shins as he moves deeper. He tries to go as fast as he can, and looks for a way out. It’s dark, and cold, it smells like shit, and he’s practically blind in here. The dread that he’ll be lost in the sewers forever is sounding more and more inevitable—lost to the point that he’ll drive himself insane in this pitch black darkness. But he breathes, choking on the disgusting stench of the air, trying to quell the terror in his head and thinks of Eddie.

Grey water, Eddie called it once. The sewage water, he called it grey water. They went under when they had to avoid a horde of zombies that overtook a small town. Eddie was the one who suggested it. It surprised Richie at the time. Surprised that Eddie with all his neuroses about cleanliness would rather go in the shithole of a sewer than find another way around. That was years ago. They weren’t together yet, but Richie was already in love. 

And Eddie complained the whole way of course.  _ What a fucking nerd, _ Richie remembers fondly. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. 

Richie walks, walks, and walks, and everything in his body aches. But he holds memories of Eddie close the whole way, as if he’s actually here, and for a moment, it feels like he’ll be okay. 

Then he crashes into a wall. 

The fear grows in his stomach, sour and sharp. He frantically checks if there’s another way: if he can turn left, if he can turn right. He feels the walls with his hands like a blind man. Hoping there’s a possibility of another way out. 

It’s a dead-end. 

Richie collapses to the ground, exhausted and hopeless. Water lapses around him. He’s so fucking tired. He doesn’t know how long he’s been walking. He just wants Eddie here. He wants to go home. 

Before Richie can completely break down, something touches his ankle. He yelps, like a moron, trying to kick it away. 

When nothing happens, and it’s not a zombie trying to gnaw off his foot, he takes a deep breath, and tries not to laugh hysterically. Or cry.

He tries to find it, his hands searching in the disease-infested grey water. When he feels something like a wet cloth, he grabs it, and holds it in his hands. It feels familiar. Why does it feel familiar? He touches plastic. It's a zipper, and Richie goes completely cold. 

No, no, no. It can’t be what Richie thinks it is. It’s  _ not _ . 

He unzips it, and feels for the contents in the bag. No, no, no, no,  _ no.  _

It’s Eddie’s fanny pack. The little shit takes it everywhere with him. It has his first-aid kit, meds, an extra knife, and fuck, even his inhaler that he hasn’t used in years. Eddie would literally die before ever losing this bag. But it’s  _ here, _ and Eddie could be…

_ No. _ He can’t go down that road. He has to find him. Right now. 

Wrapping the bag around him he races back through the sewers, footsteps echoing. Nothing matters except his husband. Not dead-ends, not water that seeps into his shoes and socks and chills him to the bone. Not the house rumbling as it falls hundreds of feet above him. 

When Richie finally catches a glimpse of light shining on the gurgling water he wades through, he nearly cries with relief. Heading straight towards it, he finds a ladder that leads to an opening up to the surface and he grabs it with both palms, giving no notice to the rust that flakes off against his skin. 

Richie tips his head up, catching a glimpse of the pinhole-light that indicates the surface. Richie takes a deep breath. Richie climbs. 

His ankle screams at him, but he doesn’t give a fuck. He climbs, chest heaving and muscles protesting. 

Fresh air hits his nose as he finally gets out of that fucking nightmare, clutching Eddie’s fanny pack close so he doesn’t drop it. He heaves himself over the edge, falling onto the dried up grass on his hands and knees. 

In front of him, the house that he and the Losers were in just a few hours ago is completely in ruins. Another sob builds in his throat. “Eddie!”

No one answers, except the distant groans of the undead. 

The gravel of the road scrapes his hands and knees. Day has fallen into night. Tears run down his face. And Richie is utterly alone. 

He whimpers Eddie’s name as he sniffles, hugging the bag tight. The sounds of zombies grow closer, and Richie knows he has to leave. He wipes away the tears and the snot, and convinces himself that his family is still alive. They got out in time, and they’re back at the camp, waiting for him. Eddie is still alive, he’s got to be. Cause how would he go on otherwise? He can picture Eddie, making an angry mark in the dirt on the ground with all his pacing as he anxiously waits Richie’s return, biting his nails with shaky hands. Eddie hates that habit of his, so Richie gets up and follows the path towards the love of his life.

Richie’s legs are sore, and the camp is still a couple days walk. He’s dead on his feet. He won’t get anywhere at this rate, and he’d rather see Eddie tomorrow than end up eaten alive. He’s got to settle somewhere tonight. Aimless, he roams the streets of the abandoned neighborhood until he finds a car. It’s broken down and useless, but it looks sturdy enough to sleep in for the night. He hopes it is, but he’s been wrong before. He thought the house would be the same. 

With the car luckily unlocked, he gets in and shuts the door. 

The ache of Richie’s wounds catch up to him, with twinges of cuts on his arms and the one above his eyebrow, still bleeding. The bruises and scratches on his chest throb. He has Eddie’s pack, and for a second he twitches toward it, thinking that he should use the bandages that Eddie keeps in there. It’d be the smart thing to do. But he shouldn’t. Eddie will need it when Richie finds him. He’ll need it more than he does. 

The air gets colder, and Richie drifts off into a troubled sleep, remembering how Eddie wraps his arms around him every night, and dreams of that instead.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we are bonkers yonkers unstoppable machines. here is chapter two

Somebody has tried to split Eddie’s head open. 

He can’t sit up at first. There’s a pain in his temple like a bullet’s gone through him and it throbs with every movement he makes, radiating down through the rest of his body in pulses that make him faintly sick.  _ Son of a bitch _ , he thinks, and remembers Bev knocking him out with the butt of her gun, though he can’t remember why.  _ Son of a bitch that hurts.  _

Eddie reaches for Richie on instinct, searching for the comfort of him. They always sleep next to each other, as close as possible, in the same bed or on the same patch of ground, heedless of the apocalyptic heat. Usually Richie’s holding onto Eddie when he wakes, although not always. 

When Eddie’s hand falls upon empty bedding, the panic pushes the pain to the wayside. 

He’s up like a flash, eyes struggling to open, nausea swinging in his gut on a pendulum. Eddie remembers yesterday. Eddie remembers Richie falling down those stairs, Eddie remembers the house beginning to groan, Eddie remembers—remembers— 

“Eddie,” says Mike, “Eddie, careful. Careful.”

He’s kneeling on the ground before Eddie, his big hands on Eddie’s shoulders like anchor points. Eddie can’t—he can’t quite focus. Mike’s image swims gently before his eyes, doubled; beyond his face is nothing but gray. 

“Richie,” says Eddie weakly, the word tripping off his tongue. He can’t get a full inhale in, something is holding his chest in stasis, inhibiting the breadth of his lungs. Richie isn’t beside him. Richie is— “Where’s Richie, Mike, where is he?”

Mike morphs back into one face as Eddie’s dizzy vision finally focuses in time with the ache of his skull. There’s movement on Eddie’s peripheral and then the rest of them are there too, the rest of the Losers, crouched around him on the floor of what looks like an empty garage. They each have a hand on him. They are touching him careful, as if he’s made of glass. 

They each have a look on their face that turns his blood to ice.

“Guys,” says Eddie. His voice is too fast, too high. He’s going to… he’s going to break something. His hands shake so hard that he balls them into fists. “Tell me where he is.”

It’s Mike who speaks, but it’s Bill’s expression that gives it away. The careful crumpling of it, edges folding in like wet tissue paper. The commiseration in his eyes. 

_ I know what it feels like _ , Bill’s face says. 

_ You can’t possibly, _ Eddie thinks.  _ You can’t possibly know.  _

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” Mike murmurs. There’s a catch in the back of his throat. His eyes are wet when Eddie looks to him—so are everyone else’s. Wet and puffy and red-rimmed. Ben cries openly, his breath unsteady. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Eddie can’t speak for a moment. Can’t speak, can’t move, can’t—can’t fucking breathe. His heart isn’t beating. 

It stopped beating when he had to leave Richie, Eddie thinks. And it’ll start beating again when he finds him. 

Eddie says, “I’m going back.”

They stare at him. It isn’t surprise in their eyes, or even confusion: it’s pity. They pity him. They think that Richie—that he— 

“I can’t,” Eddie says, and he swallows at the terrible thing that catches in his throat, that thing which feels like a sob. “I can’t leave him there.”

"Eddie,” Bev murmurs. She has one of his balled-up hands in hers, her slim fingers notched over the dips his knuckles make. There are tear tracks on her face. “Honey, you know it’s too dangerous to go back.”

“ _ No _ ,” Eddie says, sudden and vicious, poison on his tongue. He doesn’t mean to yell at her—at any of them—but they don’t  _ understand _ . “It’s not too fucking dangerous, it’s not—it’s Richie. Don’t you care about him? Don’t you care that we save him?” 

His voice cracks on the last word, shot through with tension. He is shaking with the restraint it takes not to shove them all away and run back to that house, to dig through the rubble with his own hands even if they bleed, even if his fingers crack; he won’t stop until he finds Richie himself. Eddie has never felt like this. Empty enough that the wind would whistle if it blew through him. 

“Of course we care about him,” Ben says. His voice is soft-middled, gentle and devastated. It hits Eddie like a slap. Like a punch. Like a kick. “We tried to go back in for him after we got you out, Eddie, but there were too many zombies and the structural integrity of the whole place was compromised. I should’ve—I should’ve known before we went in.” Ben has the eye of an architect, and yeah, Eddie thinks bitterly, maybe he should have. But he knows that’s not fair to say. 

”It would’ve collapsed down on us the moment we stepped foot in the place. We would’ve—Eddie. The place would’ve killed us.”

He believes them—he does, he does, they wouldn’t leave Richie if they didn’t think they had to—but that isn’t enough. 

Eddie has to find Richie himself. 

“I’m going back,” he says. “I’m going back, I’m going—I have to save him. I have to try to save him, guys, please.”

They are quiet. Eddie shakes off their hands as they don’t speak, stumbles his way to his feet, ignoring the thump of his head. 

“You don’t have to come,” he says. He forces his voice as even as he can make it right now, even though every inch of him is aflame. “I can’t ask you to do that. But you can’t ask me to leave him, either. You know you can't make me leave him.”

Eddie watches the looks that passes between them. They are considering. There is pity trapped beneath all their eyes still—but he can deal with that. 

They just don’t know. They just don’t understand. 

Richie is alive. Eddie can't live in a world where Richie isn't alive. 

Eddie will find him. 

"We can't go back inside that house," Bev says finally; she's gentle, but she's firm. "And we won't let you. We can't lose anybody else, Eddie."

The emptiness inside of him widens. Its edges grow sharp. "We won't have lost him," Eddie says, voice barely contained, "if we go back and look for him—"

"We'll go back," Bill interrupts. "And we'll look for him. But we can't go in. It's like Bev said: I-I can't lose any of you, too."

It's the first time he's spoken since Eddie woke up and his voice is rough like he's been crying, and in the middle of the landmine-panic that's radiating throughout Eddie like a shockwave, he takes a minute to feel terrible for Bill. Richie is the second person he's... the second person Bill's thought he lost since the world ended. And Richie isn't Bill's biological brother, but Bill's said before that he's as close to all the Losers as he was to Georgie. 

An apocalypse will do that. Force people together with the sheer glue of running for your life. 

Eddie would kill and die for any one of these people sitting in front of him. 

Eddie lives for Richie. 

He misses him already. Like a severed limb, like a ripped-out heart. 

"Fine," he says. He thinks of Richie the last time he saw him: the smile he always has at the ready for Eddie, even in the middle of a fight, even so exhausted that he looked a decade older than he really was. Eddie will find him. Eddie will save him. "Fine."

_ * _

_ Richie finds a treehouse to sleep in one night. _

_ Well, an unfinished one.  _

_ Despite Eddie’s protests that it could collapse any moment— _ it can and it will break your back, Richard— _ Richie convinces him like he always does. He’s good at that. In his own way.  _

_ Richie responds like this:  _ As if you haven’t broken my back many times already, Eddie baby, _ and follows it with a wide, stupid wink.  _ And no zombie will kill us up there. Unless they can suddenly sprout wings. __

_ Eddie rolls his eyes, but he’s a weak man for his husband. He knows he is. In his own way.  _

_ They climb up, Richie going first. Eddie follows, watching him as he goes, making sure Richie has a solid grip with every step. If he slips and falls, Eddie will catch him.  _

_ Richie makes it to the top with Eddie right behind him. Richie crouches near the door, and offers his hand to pull him up. Eddie grabs it, holding tightly while Richie tugs him inside, still holding hands as they stand and look around the deserted place. The air is colder here.  _

_ But—  _

_ There’s no roof. They can see the sky when they look up, they can see the stars. _

_ They’re clearer than any night Eddie’s seen them in a long time, free of light pollution or clouds. It’s perfect.  _

_ They settle in for the night, laying down their blankets, eating up a couple granola bars they found along the way.  _

_ They lie close to each other as always: Eddie wraps his arms around Richie’s middle, tucking his head under Richie’s chin. Richie cradles him, arms around Eddie’s shoulders and his hips. Eddie’s lips graze at the crook of Richie’s neck.  _

_ Sounds of rustling come from below, and they both tense. Eddie thinks of reaching for his knife but when there’s no voices or groans of the undead, he stays where he is, and he breathes. Richie was right; no one can touch them up here.  _

_ “It’s okay, sweetheart. We’re safe.” He places a soft, tender kiss to his jaw and Richie hums, letting out an uneven breath, relaxing into Eddie’s grip.  _

_ It’s quiet for a moment, except for the distant sounds of crickets, the occasional hoot of an owl, and the rhythm of Richie’s breathing, all joining together into a peaceful lullaby. Eddie’s eyes start to droop.  _

_ Then Richie’s voice breaks through it all. “What a picture-perfect house, don’t you think? A house fit for kings.” _

_ Eddie laughs, his lips brushing Riche’s pulse-point. “Sure, if kings like rain flooding their house everyday.” _

_ "Why not? It’s a free shower. You won’t have to pay for any water bills,” Richie says, wiggling his eyebrows. Eddie pinches the soft part of Richie’s love handles, causing Richie to squirm and let out a “Hey!” in protest.  _

_ Eddie smirks. “You’re an idiot.” _

_ “But at least I’m your idiot,” Richie says, pulling Eddie closer. Their noses touch each other, foreheads inches away from the other.  _

_ “Yeah,” Eddie agrees easily. “You’re my idiot.” Richie beams, and Eddie feels like everything is right in the world.  _

_ It’s quiet again, and Eddie thinks about houses. A house, just for them, just for him and Richie, if the world wasn’t on fire. And Eddie realizes he doesn’t know what kind of house Richie would want to live in. Eddie wants to know. _

_ Licking his lips, tentatively, he asks, “What would your ideal house look like if, you know, all of this didn’t happen?” He feels Richie hesitate. His breath catches a bit before answering.  _

_ “This? Like, you mean, the zombies, right?” _

_ “Yeah, of course that’s what I fucking meant, what were you thinking—” Eddie stops. Oh.  _

_ Richie looks into his eyes, seeing into his heart. Knowing Eddie just realized what he thought. Richie means them. If he and Eddie never met. Never fell in love. Never got married.  _

_ His throat feels dry, and he swallows. “Yeah, Rich. The apocalypse. If that never happened. What would your house look like?”  _

_ Richie hums again, thinking, looking up at the stars. Eddie tucks a strand of hair behind Richie’s ear as he waits. _

_ “I always imagined it small,” he answers. “A small house. With some open space, wooden floors. A couple of bedrooms. Maybe a fireplace. Nothing too fancy.” _

_ Eddie remembers his old house. The one he used to live in with his mom. It was small too. He could always sense that she was watching him. To reassure herself he didn’t do anything that could make him sick. It was always a relief when he left, he felt like he was free. Every time he had to step foot back in there, he was trapped. And he was suffocating. He doesn’t know how much more he could’ve taken, if the virus didn’t break out. He’s not sure he wants to know what would’ve happened. _

_ But Eddie thinks of him and Richie in a small house. Nothing like his old one. Eddie walking freely into the living room, sitting down on the couch next to Richie. Them, sitting by the fire with blankets around them as they cuddle, with the secure walls of their house keeping them safe, rather than them sitting outside in the freezing forest like they did a week ago, trying to make their own fire, fighting for survival. “That sounds nice, actually. I can see you in that.”  _

_ Richie turns to him, gaze soft and loving. “Yeah? Is my dream home Eddie-approved?” _

I would build it for you, if I could, _ he thinks.  _ Just say the word _.  _

_ Instead, he looks back, hoping what he didn’t say comes through, “Yeah, I like it. I really do. I guess I wouldn’t mind living with you there.” _

_ Richie huffs out a laugh, brushing his lips against his cheek, giving him a gentle kiss. “Maybe one day, Eds. In the future, if this zombie shit blows over. We’ll find a place like that. You and me.” _

_ Eddie wants to cry, just imagining it. Them living together. With no fear of losing the other. Just them, finally having the chance to rest. Making their house feel like home.  _

_ Longing shoots through his veins. He wants it. He wants it so bad.  _

_ He squeezes Richie tighter. _

_ “But for now, all we got is this broken down tree house,” Richie says, like it’s his fault the earth is a wasteland. Like it’s his fault he can’t give Eddie more. And Eddie can’t have that. He fucking can’t have Richie think he isn’t already giving him reasons to live in this world. Reasons to fight. Reasons to love.  _

_ He takes Richie into his hands, palms caressing his face. “Anywhere with you in it, Rich, is where I want to be. As long as you’re here, the rest doesn’t matter.”  _

_ Richie’s eyes glaze with tears, and his voice cracks, “Eddie…” He doesn’t say anything else, but he pulls Eddie into a bruising kiss, and Eddie knows Richie loves him the same. Everything else falls away. _

*

Richie is awake with the sun, squinting against the way it beams in through the car’s through punched-out windows. 

His spine protests as he sits up—and his ribs, his shoulders, his thighs, his lungs. Protesting against a night spent curled up on the backseat of somebody’s long-abandoned sedan like a long-abandoned dog. Protesting against being trapped under a house for who knows how many hours. Protesting against walking miles through a fucking sewer. 

Richie scrubs a hand over his face, wiping beneath his glasses. There are tear tracks dried on his cheeks. There’s dirt and dust and blood. 

God, he’s filthy. Eddie would pitch a fit. 

Richie catches sight of Eddie’s pack as he thinks that, sitting on the seat. He slept curled around it last night, holding it so tightly that his palms are cramped this morning from keeping the position of tension for so long. The sight of it sends something through him now, like a shot, like a stab. Seeing it here without Eddie is almost more terrifying than waking up beneath that rubble had been. 

At least then Richie had known he was still alive— 

“No,” Richie says out loud. His voice is cracked and blistered, shot through from inhaling so much dust last night and not having any clean water to quench it with since. He can’t think like that. Eddie  _ is  _ alive. He has to be. 

And Richie has to find him. 

He’s paralyzed with the weight of it all for a moment, sitting here in the back seat of this car whose owner has probably been dead for years, the L.A. sun beating down on him even though it’s barely morning, his throat so dry it tastes like a desert. Eddie is gone. Eddie is gone and the Losers are gone and Richie is utterly, inescapably alone. 

Richie climbs out of the car on unsteady legs, strapping Eddie’s pack to his waist. 

He has to think this through logically. 

Eddie and the Losers would have seen him fall down the steps, they would have seen the house bury him, it would have looked like Richie was dead under all of that weight… 

And fuck, Richie  _ should  _ be dead. 

Richie doesn’t believe in god anymore, if he ever did—it’s hard to believe in a god that would tear this world apart brick by brick, that would poison the well of humanity, that would bleed them like this, flay them open with a knife they can’t control, lead them blindly into the woods and leave them there—but maybe there’s still something to be said for fate. For reasons. 

Maybe Eddie is his fate. His reason. 

Richie is alive. Against all odds, Richie is alive. And Richie is going to live until he finds the man he’s living for. 

Pulling his knife out of the belt at his waist, Richie starts walking. 

The campsite he and the Losers had stayed at the night before setting out for the house is only a couple hours walk if Richie remembers correctly, although it’ll take him longer as just one person. With no extra eyes around to watch his back he finds himself taking twice as long crossing swaths of empty land, and when he comes up against the edge of a hollowed out shopping mall he and the Losers had traveled through yesterday he finds himself pausing. Hesitating. 

One one hand, his vision is going dark and spotty at the corners, and he might actually pass out if he doesn’t get a drink of water. On the other, he knows for a fact that there’s a colony of zombies in there that they didn’t eradicate yesterday, and he’s just one guy. 

Richie stands at the entrance, the shattered glass of what used to be a revolving door crunching under his feet. He can hear their moans from out here. He can see the slim, wavering shadows of them, their skin like wet paper and their arms like sticks. The shuffling sound of their movements. 

He’s so thirsty. And there’s a vending machine just inside the first hallway that Ben busted open for them all yesterday, a few bottles of water that they couldn’t carry still rolling around in the bottom. 

Richie takes a step inside. 

Nothing immediately tries to kill him so he slinks in further on careful feet, skirting the worst of the glass so he doesn’t make any attention-drawing noise. He can see the vending machine right at the end of this entrance hallway, sitting sentinel outside a J.C. Penny’s that was emptied years ago: its battered plastic shell hangs crookedly, Pepsi logo staring up at him with a weird sort of familiarity. He shivers as he reaches inside, and he thinks about growing up in a time where he cared in the slightest what kinda fucking liquid he put in his body. Cared if he was drinking Pepsi or water or goddamn Coconut La Croix. 

It’s the little things.

There is a tight little knot of the dead standing by an empty bench in the center of the mall, facing away from each other and staring sightlessly down the center of the building. That’s something Richie and Eddie had learned pretty early on after they first met, after they decided to travel together and make sense of this fucked-up world as a duo: there is nothing going on upstairs in the heads of these zombies. Whatever humanity used to reside in them—whatever personhood they used to act with—it’s completely, utterly gone now. They’re shells. 

Killing still isn’t something that Richie Tozier has learned how to do with any ease, but that knowledge has made it a little easier. 

Richie keeps quiet now as he sweeps one hand in the empty bottom of the vending machine, hoping to make contact with a bottle. They’ve learned this, too: if you keep quiet—if you don’t smell like blood—it’s possible to creep past a couple of zombies without having to run them through. They’re attracted to loud noises, to bright things like bonfires, to pungent human scents; another perk of their apparently emotionless state. 

All they do is feed.

Richie’s fingers meet the slick plastic side of a water bottle, dusty after sitting unbothered for nearly a decade, and his heart gives a solid thump of relief at the feeling. God, he could sink to his knees right here. Sit himself up against this wall and drink it all in one swallow, quiet as a fucking church mouse. 

He doesn’t. He pulls it out and tucks it into one of the pockets of his cargo pants, and then he reaches in for more. 

The moans of the dead echo in here. They spiral up to the ceiling, out the hole where a sky window used to be. 

That window is gone now, lead panes and glass sheets probably collected for weaponry back when there were more unturned people on this forsaken earth. Back when there was anybody except the Losers. 

He ends up with four bottles, his cramped hands shaking by the time he’s done. Richie is bent over strangely to access the bottom, and his legs are still tired from walking so long yesterday, for climbing so long on top of that—and maybe that’s why he does it. Maybe it’s his body’s fault. 

Or maybe he’s thinking of his friends, his husband, and he’s distracted. 

Either way. 

Richie slips. 

His knees hit the cracked tile with two sharp sounds and he drops the fourth bottle back inside the vending machine on instinct; the sound of it echoing through the hollow insides rolls through this empty mall like thunder. The zombies turn toward him at that. 

That, and the scent of blood that pours out of him when he slices his forearm on the jagged edge of the front panel. 

“Fuck,” Richie says, out loud since they’ve already noticed him anyway. No sense in holding back now. 

He lurches to his feet, leaving the fourth bottle, and swipes his knife from where he’d set it aside on the floor. The dead move awkwardly, but they also move quickly: they’re shambling toward him already, four of them, their arms outstretched and their heads cocked at a grim, terrible angle that makes his empty stomach lurch with disgust. 

Richie stumbles backward. He isn’t willing to turn around, expose his back to them for a second. Not without Eddie watching. 

It’s been a long fucking time since he’s fought alone. 

The first one goes down easy. 

Richie has been with other people for six years, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been fighting. He’s ready for the first zombie that gains on him, its yellow teeth sharp in its mouth like needless, exposed at the roots by rotting gums—he catches it in the throat with a flick of his blade, sawing through mushy bone with only slightly more effort than he usually has to expend. The thing’s head tips backwards and off of its shoulders with a sound like a tear, and the blood gets on him immediately, thicker than human blood, darker, like cold tar, and he shivers at it touches his skin but he’s alive, he’s alive— 

He can’t get a good angle on the rest of them. They are pressed up close, their hands roving all over his shirt and his shoulders and his neck and his arms; Richie elbows one in the sternum, hard, and sends it stumbling back, but that isn’t enough to kill it. They’re like cockroaches. Resilient, infectious. You’ve got to go for the jugular, or go for the heart. 

Fighting with the Losers was a work of cooperation, of efficiency. Fighting as one man is nothing but a desperate grasp for survival. 

By the time there’s only one zombie for Richie to face off against his chest is heaving, and the dryness in his throat has grown into an ache. 

“Let’s go, you inconvenient bitch,” Richie rasps, holding his knife aloft as it advances. There is blood soaking the skin of both his hands, dripping down his forearms and collecting in the dips of his elbows; he can feel his heart like something that wants to get out, slamming the curve of his ribs in anger. “Come at me.”

It is anticlimactic, in the end. 

He misjudges where his swing will land. His knife enters the body above the place where a naval should be, sinking in to the hilt immediately, and zombie moans the way they all do, agonized and unearthly, and Richie wraps both hands around the handle of his blade and jerks it upward, cutting a clean slice through spongy rib cage and brittle shoulder, splitting the creature in two. 

It lands on the ground in pieces, splattering decayed organs all over the place. 

Richie would think he’d be used to this sort of thing by now, but he’s definitely not: he feels something churn in his stomach looking at the corpse, feeling light headed and nauseous. He wants to fucking throw up. But he doesn’t. It would waste time. 

Another thing he learned: don’t stand around, and move on quick. That’s the only way to survive. 

So he just takes in a deep breath and grabs that fourth bottle of water. He sure as hell fucking needs it. And if he takes that Pepsi too, well. He thinks he’s earned it, and maybe Eddie will get a kick out of it too. Richie can’t wait to see his face when he drinks an expired bottle of soda. His cute caterpillar brows furrowed and hand slicing the air. It will make this hell of a journey worth it. 

Fitting all the bottles into his cargo pants, he moves on. 

He takes a few shortcuts, navigating the most populated areas as best he can. Down some alleyways. Cut a few corners. Not the route he and the Losers took yesterday, but it’s quicker. Faster. He’ll see his family soon. He’ll see Eddie. 

Walking through the outskirts of LA, through the neighborhoods, all of it abandoned save for the few zombies that crawl on the cracked roads, it never gets any easier to see. This was Richie’s home. As much as he hated crowds, he fucking misses them. LA beaming with life and light, rowdy kids on skateboards trying to learn new tricks, people walking home groceries in hand, couples holding hands with no worry in the world. Before the eerie sounds of the sirens blared through the streets of the city, and destroyed any semblance of peace there was. For a while, it was home. 

But then, Richie’s parents died. Saving him. And it shattered everything. 

He dreams of them, sometimes. Not often, which makes him feel like shit when he’s laughing with Eddie and his parents are gone because of him. It used to be everyday, their screams echoing in his nightmares. 

He was only visiting them from college, the usual. They peppered him with kisses, jokes and stupid voices that his dad lent to him, and support for his long-dead aspiration to become a comedian. Ha, what a fucking joke. At least he’s earned the title of the funny one with the Losers. A trashmouth. 

They woke him up in the middle of the night. Told him to leave, to get out. And for a moment, he thought he did something wrong. They didn’t want him anymore. He argued, and his idiotic fears of being left behind froze him in place. And it killed them. He killed them.

Their old house is on the other side of LA, drawing closer and closer as he moves towards the camp. He wonders if they’re still there. If they’re still one of the mindless monsters that Richie kills everyday. The bodies that used to be his parents, wandering around the place he grew up in. Or dead, in the middle of the street. Richie never got to bury them. 

He told Eddie a few years ago: what happened. Eddie comforted him, put a hand on his shoulder, hugged him. Rubbed soothing circles on his back. He always tells him it wasn’t his fault. But Richie’s always quiet when he says that. 

Richie walks a bit longer, avoiding any zombies that he can. Then he reaches the small bridge that leads to the camp. And he  _ sprints.  _ Eddie, Eddie,  _ Eddie—  _ “Eddie!” He doesn’t give a fuck if zombies are nearby, he’s going to see  _ Eddie.  _

He keeps calling his name as he runs into the camp, and he sees—

No one. 

The tents are gone. The fire is cold. They haven’t been here in a while.

They left. They left him here. They left him behind—

_ Okay, calm fucking down, idiot _ , his mind tells him. It sounds like Eddie. They were heading towards water. Towards the river. So they probably thought Richie would head there. Maybe. Richie crouches down, putting his head in his hands. Fuck, he thought this nightmare would be over. He just wants to lay his head in Eddie’s lap, with the feeling of Eddie’s fingers brushing through his curls.  _ Soon.  _ Just keep going.  _ Don’t stand around, move on. And you’ll find them.  _ So he moves on.

*

It takes two or three hours of walking without a stop for them to reach the house again. 

Eddie knows the rest of his friends want to go slow for him—each step sends another bolt of pain to his tender temple—but there is so much adrenaline coursing through his veins right now that he couldn’t walk slowly if he tried. 

There’s a string tied to Eddie’s ribs that must be tied to Richie, too; something that hauls him across this wrecked land without hope of stopping. 

He doesn’t want to stop. He wants Richie. 

“I got you good,” Bev says, when they’re just a few minutes away from their destination. She’s been matching Eddie’s pace evenly even with her shorter legs, her pistol fitted in her palm where it belongs. This is the first time she speaks to him since leaving the garage. She points at his head. “Damn.”

There’s a bandage over the spot, so Eddie can only assume it bled. Bev is the best shot of anybody he’s ever met, but she’s also got a mean backswing, apparently. 

And there’s something like an apology in her voice when she speaks to him now, buried under enough layers of bravado that neither of them feels too awkward to go on. 

“You’ve got an arm on you, Marsh,” Eddie says. It’s the first time he’s spoken since they set out, too. He’s surprised he can say anything other than  _ Richie, Richie, Richie.  _ “Impressive.”

She knocks her elbow into his side and then tips her head briefly against his shoulder, fierce and affectionate. “I love you, you know,” she says. “All of us do. And we love him, too.”

He has to close his eyes for a moment. The sun is bright, and his heart aches. 

“I know,” he whispers, and he does. They all love Richie. Just not the way Eddie does. 

Bev hooks her hands around his elbow, holding on for the rest of their journey. 

There’s an abandoned car here on the side of the road a few yards away from the house, and Eddie stops beside it as the ruin crawls into view. 

Before, when Eddie was a kid—when things like television were parts of everyday life rather than distant memories—he would watch cooking shows sometimes, one of the only items on his mother’s list of pre-approved TV appropriate for his eyes that he could tolerate. He liked the ones where they made cakes: towering confections with too many tiers to be practical, full of fancy piping and delicate layers. The real drama of those kinds of shows, however, always came when the contestants would drop their creations. Levels collapsing in on themselves, topsy-turvy, a mangled mess. 

The house looks like one of those ill-fated cakes. 

The middle has dropped out of it entirely, sunk down far enough that the roof is an inverse of itself. The gables are nothing but bare, reaching beams, and the windows are like hollow eyes, staring down at Eddie and the Losers. The front doorway is collapsed entirely: the only way in the building would be through a hole Eddie can see between a place where one wall lies horizontal over the shattered cement stoop, slim and jagged around the edges. Even that is a stretch: it’s a very small opening. One he knows Richie wouldn’t be able to fit through. 

His breath is shallow, and too fast. 

Ben murmurs Eddie’s name but Eddie shakes his head, quick, tight. He can’t—he can’t. “Check the back,” he says, voice a rasp. “Come on, let’s… come on.”

They’re kind enough not to exchange looks around him, even though Eddie’s sure they must want to. He leads them around the side of the house and then around the back, searching for any kind of opening. 

There’s nothing. The house is nearly flat to the ground, collapsed down into that basement Richie and Eddie had been investigating yesterday, nothing but rubble for Eddie to stare at. The ground is wet and soupy beneath his feet, probably from a burst water line; he backs up a couple of steps, right into Bill. 

Bill’s arm goes around Eddie’s shoulders, and then Bev takes his elbow again, and Ben and Mike flank the trio of them on either side. They look at the house for a long time. Eddie doesn’t think he’s even breathing. 

“He must’ve gotten out,” Eddie says finally. 

He sounds taut and desperate even to his own ears, his words an ache. Nobody answers him, and it’s better that way—he needs this. He needs to believe that Richie got out like he needs air to breathe. 

“Richie—“ and he has to pause for a moment over that name. The dear, familiar shape of it. The warm weight of it on his tongue. “Richie’s resourceful. He’s so… he’s so fucking smart. I know he got out, because I’d know if he was under there. I’d  _ know. _ ”

And as he speaks, Eddie starts to realize that it’s true. 

He is more attuned to Richie than to anybody he’s ever met. He reads Richie’s micro-expressions easily: knows when he’s about to smile or argue or laugh or tell Eddie he’s hungry. He knows when Richie is lying about feeling good; knows when his grin is hiding something stirred-up and hurt underneath. He can always feel when Richie needs to take a break, or when he needs to stop entirely, or if he’s in danger, even when they’re in separate rooms. 

Eddie knows his husband. And he’d know if he was trapped under this house. 

And he isn’t. He isn’t. 

“He’s so smart,” Eddie repeats. “And he can take care of himself.” Even if Eddie would rather take care of him. “He must have gotten out before it fell completely. He—he has to be heading to the river like we were before. He has to be.”

“I hope so,” Mike whispers, giving a voice to what they’re all thinking. “God, Eddie, I hope so.”

They will keep walking to where they were headed. They will find the river, and hopefully find civilization with it. 

And by god, they will find Richie. 

**Author's Note:**

> you can find us both on twitter [@unicornpoe](https://twitter.com/unicornpoe) and [@sabisuns](https://twitter.com/sabisuns) !


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